Get a game or puzzle book and help save lives​

Get a game or puzzle book and help save lives

We wanted to thank and update you on all the things Lone Shark has done to get people games and puzzles during the pandemic. After all, it’s our job to put smiles on people’s faces even when they are grappling with hardships. We’ve been uplifted by all your responses to our efforts. Here’s some more things we’re doing to help.

All this is explained below, so if you have the time, please read on.

Get this Humble Bundle and beat coronavirus

Our pals at Humble Bundle reached out to see if we could help create something positive in this crisis. We weren’t the only ones. Dozens of our fellow publishers pitched in to make the greatest charity bundle ever. So many great games and books are in here, many with a puzzling theme such as Jonathan Blow’s logic puzzle video game The Witness.

Our contributions were the two volumes of our socially conscious puzzle books Crosswords of Wisdom, by Mike and the recently wedded Gaby Weidling and Mark Gottlieb. If you’re looking for uplifting and inspiring puzzles that are really about important things in life, go over to the bundle page and spend $30 on an incredible cornucopia of entertainment. Over $1,000 worth, in fact.

We’re not making a cent on this. None of the publishers are, nor is Humble Bundle. Every penny goes to Doctors Without Borders, Direct Relief, International Rescue Committee, and Partners in Health. All of it. As I write this, 108,000 people have raised THREE AND A HALF MILLION DOLLARS in just two days. Please go join them!

Grab the Humble Conquer COVID-19 Bundle!

We brought back our Apocrypha playmats with a goal to support doctors and nurses

For a year, we’ve been asked, “When are you bringing back those sweet Apocrypha playmats?” For a while, we resisted. But then we met Inked Gaming, an accessory company whose values aligned closely with ours. When the pandemic crested the horizon, Inked put its team of creators on a very different project: making ten thousand masks for doctors and nurses. That’s when we knew we were backing the right horse.

So Skylar and Liz made not just one version that resembles our older half size version, but a new full-table playmat for up to six players. (Ignore the title: It’s for six.) When you buy your playmats, you can get free shipping when you add on some masks. For every mask you buy, Inked will donate four masks to medical professionals. We hope you’ll follow those Inked links and contribute to the cause while getting some stylish gear for our game.

Get an Apocrypha mat and get masks to medics!

The Save Our Sanity offer continues with a new crossword bonanza

We’ve been overwhelmed by the positive response to our Save Our Sanity offer, which continues to ship out our games, books, and puzzles at our lowest prices possible. We’d like to thank our media friends such as Shut Up & Sit Down, The Opinionated Gamers, and Forbes for spreading the word.

We’ve run out of items like the Maze Map, the softcover Theseus Guide, Thornwatch pawns, and Apocrypha’s Boxes of Hope. What’s still available:

  • We’re down to our last hundred-plus copies of our perennial best-seller, The Maze of Games. If you want a copy of the normally $50 puzzle novel for $19.95 before we’re out for … well, probably quite a while, now’s your chance.
  • Thornwatch is $24.95 and its expansion The Dark of the Wood is $19/95.
  • Apocrypha’s base set The World is $24.95, the expansions The Flesh and The Devil are $19.95 each, The Book of the Hybrids at $1.95, and Revelation Dice and our few remaining Soulbinders at $5 apiece
  • Paul and Storm’s Sausage Party is $14.95, while The Ninth World is $19.95 and its Playmap is $5.
  • Our Friends of the Sharks books Game Theory in the Age of Chaos and The Ghastlytrump Tinies are $10 each and The Kobold Guide to Board Game Design is $11.95.
  • Puzzlecraft is $14.95 and its workbook is $5.

All our puzzle PDFs are $5 or less. And speaking of that, this just assembled itself out of pixels and magic.

Puzzlepack #6: Crossword Bonanza is the sixth PDF booklet in Lone Shark’s series of puzzlepacks. This all-new collection by Mike Selinker, subtitled All Crosswords Great and Small, consists of 13 crosswords of sizes from a tiny 11×11 to four Sunday puzzle 21x21s. Some have unique themes and weird surprises, while others are of the wide-open “themeless” variety. Features a guest appearance by Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me host Peter Sagal! If you’re looking for brain-teasing crosswords, this is the collection for you.

Head to our Save Our Sanity offer!

Lords of Vegas gets a Kickstarter date and a cause

We’ve spent the last couple months figuring out what we want to do now that we have Lords of Vegas back in our studio. This year is the 10th anniversary of the game, so we want to do a Kickstarter campaign for a new expansion, a blinged-out “Boss Bundle,” and a 15th anniversary edition of our popular poker book Dealer’s Choice. We’re very excited about this!

We know launching a game into a jittery economic environment is risky, but we really want to make this game for all of our fans, who seem to really want it. So we’ve set April 21st as our launch date for the 10th Anniversary Lords of Vegas Underworld & Boss Bundle campaign. We very much want your support, so please click this link to be notified when it goes live. Here’s a preview of some art for it, from the irrepressible Nate Taylor.

And here’s what the cover sketch for Underworld is looking like. We brought back Steve Fastner and Rich Larson, who did the box art for the base set. What they’re cooking up is gorgeous.

That’s good stuff. But we wanted to do one more thing. We were thinking about how the closing down of Vegas affects us, not just because we made a game about it, but on an emotional level. We spend a lot of time in Vegas, and knowing that 600,000 casino workers are out of work just kills us. So we’re making a special charity card called Vegas Shutdown (a nod to our other favorite board game of this type, Vegas Showdown) that we’ll use to raise money for Nevada charities to get Vegas back on its feet. We’ll have a preview of that next time. Stay strong, Vegas.

Head to the Lords of Vegas notification page!

That’s what we have planned in our efforts to keep people happy during these trying times. Stay safe, stay healthy, and stay in touch!


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